The 911 system in Dallas has been experiencing hiccups the past few weeks in the routing of 911 calls—and both sides are blaming the other over these mishaps. T-Mobile claimed the Dallas call centers are understaffed, while the city is blaming the carrier’s engineer team for local network errors, reports the Dallas Observer.
Issues with the area’s emergency system came to the forefront when a six-month old infant died after his babysitter tried, unsuccessfully, to phone 911 three times. Initially, the city blamed “ghost calls” for the network errors, but later said the term was a mislabel and that it doesn’t yet know the real issue.
“We don’t know what went wrong yet,” said the City of Dallas public information office director Sana Syed in a recent interview with local press.
T-Mobile claims the Dallas 911 emergency system is understaffed and outdated, while Mayor Mike Rawlings seemingly placed blame on T-Mobile engineers when he said the company was in the process of addressing network issues to repair the problem.
The city has defended itself from criticism by noting that the city has only had issues with T-Mobile calls and no other carrier.
In response to the public outcry over the 911 network issues, the city has placed extra call takers—12 in total—at local 911 call centers. The city said it will continue with the additional staffing until the problem is fully resolved.
Last Friday and Saturday, the city met the National Emergency Number Association standard—90.98 percent of calls were answered within 10 seconds on Friday, and 92.06 percent on Saturday; the NENA standard holds that 90 percent of calls must be answered within 10 seconds.
March 22, 2017
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